Art as Unlearning

Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy

John Baldacchino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138318717
• eBook ISBN: 9780429845543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Art as Unlearning makes an argument for art's unlearning as a manneristpedagogy. Art's pedagogy facilitates a form of forgetfulness by extending what happens in the practice of the arts in their visual, auditory and performative forms. The concept of learning has become predominantly hijacked by foundational paradigms such as developmental narratives whose positivistic approach has limited the field of education to a narrow practice within the social sciences. This book moves away from these strictures by showing how the arts confirm that unlearning is not contingent on learning, but rather anticipates and avoids it.

This book cites the experience and work of artists who, by unlearning the canon, have opened a diversity of possibilities by which we make and live the world. Moving beyond clichés of art's teachability and what we have to learn through the arts, it advances a scenario where unlearning is uniquely presented to us by the diverse practices that we identify with the arts. The very notion of art as unlearning stems from and represents a fundamental critique of the constructivist pedagogies that have dominated arts education for over half a century.

This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, philosophy of education, history of education, pedagogy of art and art education. It will also appeal to educators, art educators, and artists interested in the pedagogy of art.

Chapter 1

Undoing Mona Lisa

I once asked a group of artist-teachers: “Can we undo the Mona Lisa?”

Someone asked back: “What would that look like?”

I replied: “I don’t know. But I often think that works of art must go undone. It’s an educational prerogative for art to teach us nothing and for us to unlearn everything.”

Beyond any intent to belittle the role of the arts in education (an accusation to which I am no stranger), my objective is twofold: (a) to bring art in some relief in its relationship with education; (b) to distance art and education from the instrumentalist expectations that reify and stultify them respectively.

This book was written with one purpose: to invite readers to reassess, recalibrate and reposition art and education beyond the expectations by which they are overinflated and devalued in equal measure. More specifically, I invite readers to assert the autonomy by which we all lay claim to the world through art and education. However, to do so, we must turn the table on education from the perspective of art, where in its versatile and plural meanings, art is read as a collective term which implies the creative arts. By this we mean art as that which brings together the Latin notion of ars with the Ancient Greek τέχνη (téchne). Yet as art has evolved and has increasingly engaged with other than art, its specificity cannot go ignored. By identifying art’s specificity, we afford ourselves the ability to play on the wider and variegated meanings of art as an innovative yet established concept. Likewise, the terms “art education” (where art is understood both as a singular but sometimes stands for a collective noun) and “arts education” (where the arts are read as a field of diverse artistic disciplines) need to be read on this wider horizon of possible meanings, practices and implications. This will help us understand and emphasize what, customarily, education has often been forced to reject: our need to forget and our ability to unlearn.

Before going further, I am working on the assumption that there is some agreement on how a designation like arts education is never clear because to discuss it one must keep it open to constant change. The hallmark of a field like arts education is its array of possibilities. Without its plural possibilities, and more so without a distinction between the arts and education, any attempt to discuss this wide field remains trapped in a tautology that leaves it vulnerable to instrumental reason (see Baldacchino 2017). It is worth noting that while the literature on instrumentalism and instrumental reason is substantial and keeps growing, sourcing one’s critique from Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), and more specifically Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (2012) and Eclipse of Reason (2013), helps one retain a historical perspective of why this remains central to both art and more so, educational discourse.

As we consider art education as a constellation of connections and possibilities, we recognize the nature of its open-endedness. There is significant redundancy in arguing how this relationship remains useful, correct and relevant to whatever we happen to have in mind when we speak of art and education. Yet it is neither superfluous and less so obvious to insist that in a myriad of forms and practices, one cannot simply assume that art is by nature or necessity an instrument or tool of learning. Art educators are mostly force-fed with the belief that learning is art’s given. This does not only distort the relationship between art and education but reinforces the institutionalization of learning where every possibility is already defined and thereby foreclosed.

The institutional assault on human knowledge has nothing to do with subsuming art within education. Actually, the vulnerable party in this relationship is not art but education, especially in how education is often reduced to a practicist state of affairs. Whether forced as a means of legitimation within industry by conservative politics or camouflaged under some self-deluded pretext of “radical praxis” by progressivists, practicism is an assault on the autonomy by which humans have always asserted their right to do art and engage in educational and other spheres of living as free and intelligent beings.

Practicism takes two forms. The first is an assumption that practice per se is an immediate demonstration of worth and legitimacy, where art is described by what it makes in terms of the value and yield of its objects and action. This objectification of the process and its product is often articulated as a benefit. In the second instance practice is seen through a productivist approach, ascribed to perspectives of industry and education that share a common ground from where versions from both the left and the right of the political spectrum argue that, as productive endeavours, the arts legitimize their role in both progress and the preservation of traditional values. While prima facie this all looks harmless, the implications of practicism are far from straightforward, as it will be discussed in the first, third and sixth chapters of this volume.

No love lost

Being an artist and educator who is deeply engaged in philosophy, I remain mindful of the contingency by which art education, as a form of action, provides a degree of protection from the tyranny of the here and now. One way out of this predicament is found in Umberto Eco’s approach to the work of art as an opera aperta, an open work. Eco’s cue is taken from music. He specifically singles out his friend Luciano Berio, whose Sequenza for solo flute was written without any bar lines, thus leaving it open to the performer’s interpretation. This meant that no one performance of the Sequenza was ever intended to be fixed. Less so was there a canonical desire to preserve a work of art for posterity (or at the very least, not in that way). As Eco puts it, in these works of instrumental music there is a common feature: “the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play his work” (Eco 1989, p. 1).

Yet before one gets carried away, this was only a parting shot. Eco moves on to develop an elaborate book, where the reader is not afforded the kind of openness that is customarily assumed in common parlance. His take on the open work is underlined by forms of commitment which require a great deal from the performer and the audience. To have autonomy also means that one cannot afford the luxury of relying on goals set by a heteronomous context, even when without such a context there will be no autonomy and less so a possibility of openness (see Baldacchino 2018).

Artists and art educators must hold onto the openness that sustains art’s autonomy, even when this appears to move outside the boundaries of legitimacy. Without art’s autonomy any talk of liberty and freedom in their subtle distinctions becomes void. As the notion of what remains empty “outside” any presumed form of walled legitimacy is seen for the fallacy that it represents (as I argue in Chapter 5), an open-ended approach to the binary relationship between art and education must move beyond the subject–object divide. Unlearning these constructs is not easy, particularly when the notion of learning-as-growth remains trapped in the myth of social and developmental inevitability.

As we seek to unlearn such constructs we must avoid falling into the traps which customarily describe (let alone dismiss) the arts as being subjective by virtue of their creative character. Nor should we seek legitimation by quick-fixes where, as often happens in education, we speak of forcing disciplines into artificial assumptions of integration. This would amount to nothing but a desire to add another shibboleth to policy-making, which in its search of immediate solutions, it demands a structure of legitimation that in the long run, undermines the significance of those forms of autonomy that we claim by doing art.

I would beg to differ with those who say that an argument on subjectivity could somehow place the arts in direct opposition with the presumption of scientific objectivism. The strongest denial would not come from the artist but from the natural scientist herself who rightly lays claim to the open-ended nature of her experimental methods of discovery, where the subject–object divide is rendered irrelevant. While faked forms of integration are short-lived, it is equally disingenuous to place disciplines, fields and practices into hierarchies or text-book taxonomies. As needs (must) go, hierarchies and taxonomies are the first to be rejected where experimentation comes in full bloom.

Rather than try to make the subject of art objective or indeed on the subjective merits of science, from the very start one must clarify that when one speaks of education, to seek any agreement that would sustain the divisive subject–object construct would foreclose any possibility of new and alternative forms of doing, thinking and finding in any field—be it arts based, scientific, hybrid or distinct.

This leaves us with what some would all too quickly dismiss as a cliché: the need to seek dispute and contradiction. Be they participants or passive spectators, readers must allow some space for the fact that in an open work the interpretation of one’s world (in all the different and contrasting ways by which we announce or confess it) is both expected and considered as a good thing to do. In this sense, there can be no love lost between art and education. By this I mean that we have no choice but to remain very singular in our opinions while we come to realize (and admit) that we are all too universal in our nakedness. Throughout our entire life we are never sure how prepared we have to be and somehow the only thing that we have for certain is that we have ourselves and nothing else to cover our bodies. If anything, this is what the articulation of art within an educational and institutional context invariably reveals.

Readers should feel reassured that while opinion, informed or otherwise, must not be frowned upon, more importantly there is nothing wrong with dispositions and even our prejudices, as long as these do not hurt anyone in particular. What is here meant by prejudice and disposition is the ability and inclination to come with judgements already made before one even starts a conversation. The openness is not one sided. It comes before the conversation. Otherwise the assumptions brought to the table are already dismissed. The reason that this approach is highly valued in this book has to do with the awareness of what a point of departure, a terminus a quo, must always mean: the decision to risk one’s own reputation by embracing what is deemed erroneous or mistaken by the many. Thus, as one starts from wherever that departure might occur, it helps no one if we try to hide our instincts and responses—without which, by the way, we can neither learn and less so unlearn what we know, feel and mean. After all, this is what really makes us who we are.

The joyous one

Nat King Cole sang to her smile, because let’s not forget that Leonardo da Vinci called her La Gioconda, the joyous one. So, what would it really mean to undo Mona Lisa? Wipe off her smile as Mr. Bean does to Whistler’s Mother’s face? Adorn her with red lipstick, as Warhol did in his glamorous prints? Or regale her with a moustache and a wee beard, while making rude allusions to her derrière, as Duchamp suggests?

My thought of undoing Mona Lisa was mostly coincidental. I nurture no desire to add anything to Leonardo’s famous pin-up. The “undoing” quip came about from a sense of tiredness and the customary self-doubt which after all is said not done, lectures are lectures and discussions must mean more to those who engage in them than with what is actually said. I suggested an undoing of the revered masterpiece to shift emphasis. Yet instead, I found myself grappling with an idea that sounded too fascinating to forget.

What brought this about was a two-hour seminar in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) back in 2013, delivering what I titled Art as Unlearning: Finding a Place (see Baldacchino & McAuliffe 2013). One could feel that the broad expectation fell on me to do most of the talking, as an audience of artist-teachers came well-prepared with a couple of long papers which are here included in this volume as Chapters 4 and 5. The expectation was to buy into unlearning as a concept, but for this to have a price—that of how, when and where, even when art teachers are never estranged from the very idea of pushing their students into rejecting what they know, or at the very least, into leaving their baggage outside the art room or studio.

As I subsequently reflected on the discussion, I found this quip very revealing in that undoing a work of art required several strategies that would not necessarily guarantee any success, given that there is no one end—indeed no point of arrival, no terminus ad quem —which could with any certainty be used to “measure” anything for anyone. This is another good thing, as the last thing one wants is to flag an objective that should or could be measured and legitimized by some external metric.

Having had the opportunity to revisit the undoing of Mona Lisa several times in subsequent lectures where I had to do so formally and with some clarity, I am now more or less clear that to do so, we must at least attempt three related approaches, which, as it happens, will also run across this book. Briefly I would characterize them as follows: that which is found (a) within the outwith ; how one could go about (b) undoing art; and how to likewise consider (c) unlearning education.

This immediately pairs six words: (a) within and outwith; (b) doing and undoing; and (c) learning and unlearning. In turn, this raises at least three questions: (a) Where is this within and outwith? (b) What are we doing and undoing? (c) How do we learn and unlearn?

Curiously whatever raises these questions may be very different (if not conflicting) but all possibilities look similar because they share a common origin and are often urged by the same questions that keep coming to us time and time again.

Within and outwith

Starting with what is within and outwith, this could be anywhere and nowhere because what we mean by what is intrinsic and extrinsic could be physical, conceptual or a bit of both. We often see ourselves as belonging to a community, city or village and become all too conscious of how we come to be within or outwith such as city or community. We could take a bigger picture and look at how we remain within or outwith a world outlook, a concept, a religion, an ideology or any philosophy or way of life.

Without veering off into abstraction, we often think whether anything has a within, an interiority (or immanence, as philosophers would say) or whether what we are and do always lies outwith everything else because the world is made of units, thing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Sources and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Undoing Mona Lisa
• 2. Art, doubt and error
• 3. Learning with art
• 4. Art’s deschooled practice
• 5. Willed forgetfulness
• 6. Art’s false ease
• 7. The ventriloquist’s soliloquy
• 8. A mannerist pedagogy
• Index